It was five past midnight on the night of the 2nd to the 3rd December 1984. A terrifying cloud of toxic gas escaped from an American pesticide plant set in the heart of the ancestral Indian city of Bhopal. Killing between sixteen and thirty thousand and injuring five hundred thousand people, it was the most murderous industrial disaster in history. This book recounts the poignant human and technological adventure leading up to the tragedy. An Indian peasant's family driven from their land by a swarm of ravaging aphids-Three New York entomologists who invent a miracle pesticide-A giant chemical company that finds a deadly gas with which to manufacture it-Young Western engineers determined to rescue the Third World from its famines-A plant 'as inoffensive as a chocolate factory'-The joy and festivities of the condemned of the slums-Eunuchs and princesses who bewitch the American engineers-A poetry loving workman who unleashes the apocalypse-Heroic doctors who die giving victims mouth to mouth resuscitation-A young Indian bride who escapes the flames of a funeral-pyre because of the small cross around her neck. Hundreds of characters, situations and adventures are telescoped into this fresco full of love, heroism, faith and hope. A real tragedy of crucial relevance to our times, which is also a warning to all those sorcerer's apprentices who threaten the future of our planet.